The COVID-19 pandemic, despite its unprecedented scale, mirrored previous disasters in its predictable missteps in preparedness and response. Rather than blaming individual actors or assuming better leadership would have prevented disaster, I examine how standard political incentives—myopic voters, bureaucratic gridlock, and fear of blame—predictably produced an inadequate...
Democracy has flourished twice in human history: first in ancient Greece and then, more than two millennia later, in the modern world. Although the historical record regarding most Greek poleis (city-states) is scant, there nevertheless exists sufficient information to categorize the constitutions of nearly 200 of the more than 1000 poleis that once existed. Using similar data...
We investigate the effect of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the research productivity of scholars affiliated with around 15,000 Ukrainian research institutions. Using the 2014 Russian invasion as a quasi-natural experiment, we apply a difference-in-differences estimator on a sample of half a million journal articles collected from Scopus. Researchers affiliated with institutions...
Scholars of democratic representation argue that polity size affects political representation in a multitude of ways. Studies of elections consistently show a negative correlation between population size and political participation, particularly in first-past-the-post (FPTP) elections. Less research has investigated the effects of size scaling in mixed electoral systems. I posit...
We study charitable behaviour when genuine donations can be misinterpreted as being greedy. This is relevant when private benefits from donating, like tax exemptions, bring into question whether donors are truly altruistically motivated. In our experiment, a potential donor, the distributor, decides how to split a sum of money between themselves, a paired non-distributor, and a...
We introduce a new concept, constitutional loyalty, which we define as the importance citizens ascribe to their government’s compliance with constitutional rules. Its measurement across countries is challenging due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as a setting in which societies around the world face...
Why did the Minsk Accords fail to prevent the current Ukraine War? Standard explanations for the diplomatic failure center on irreconcilable commitment problems between Moscow and Washington: both revisionist with respect to the other, neither able to credibly promise non-involvement in the other’s perceived sphere of influence, and both capable of recruiting local allies within...
The space of human possibilities is vast and ever-growing in a creative, unpredictable fashion. Still, prices form. Acknowledging the costs of choice invokes the famous infinite regress argument wherein utility can’t be calculated without first computing an infinite chain of transaction costs. Rational individuals, to avoid getting stuck in infinite regress, must look outside...
Can incentive schemes deliver value in the public sector, despite major principal-agent challenges? We evaluate a reform that introduced individual teacher performance-related pay and tournaments in public schools in Portugal, despite trade union opposition. We find evidence that the focus on individual performance decreased student achievement (as measured by national exams) and...
The February 2023 earthquake in Turkiye resulted in 54,000 fatalities and over $100 billion in economic losses. We examine whether this catastrophic event influenced incumbent-party support in the subsequent election. In contrast with previous researchers, we find no significant effect on voter turnout or the incumbent party’s vote share, even after accounting for population...
The relationship between job security and politicians’ legislative effort is bidirectional, making isolating the impacts, and the mechanisms underlying them, in either direction difficult. Increased legislative effort could increase politicians’ job security, as they might be considered to be more desirable by voters, however, increased job security can change the incentives to...
The Japanese government is attempting to put emergency clauses in the Constitution. Although the overwhelming majority of legal scholars and practitioners vehemently oppose the initiative, public opinion polls indicate a close divide between opponents and supporters. This division may partly stem from the difficulty the public faces in reaching a conclusive decision through...
Dishonest politicians can jeopardize economic development. How do disasters change politicians’ incentives to lie? We employ a difference-in-differences approach to show that public officials who were exposed to China’s 1959–1961 famine as children (aged 0–6 years) are less likely to manipulate local GDP calculations; the reduction is more significant for officials who were more...
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented use of mandatory lockdowns—defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention—took place. We conduct a meta-analysis to determine the effect of these lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality. Our meta-analysis finds that lockdowns in the spring of 2020 had a relatively small effect on COVID...
For decades, non-state actors have supplied criminal law in Brazil’s favelas. This paper offers a humanomics account of the private provision of an impure public good. Our analysis reaches three conclusions. First, criminal law can be provided without either public intervention or reliance on the price system. Informal norms may be sufficient, indicating that Adam Smith’s...
Over the past century, the administrative state has vastly expanded its power and political independence of Congress. Some prominent academic voices, such as Cass Sunstein and Joseph Heath, have argued that we should endorse the administrative state’s large and growing powers to reap the benefits of technical expertise. We introduce an important qualification to that claim by...